Liability

MINSK, 14 January (BelTA) – Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko signed decree No.15 “On responsibility for nuclear damage” on 14 January, the press service of the head of state told BelTA.

The document creates a mechanism to ensure financial assurance for damage caused by an activity involving nuclear energy. The decree limits the liability for damage of the state enterprise Belarusian Nuclear Power Plant to 150 special drawing rights per nuclear incident.

Catastrophic nuclear accidents, like Chernobyl in 1986 or Fukushima No. 1 in 2011, are very rare, we’re incessantly told, and their probability of occurring infinitesimal. But when they do occur, they get costly. So costly that the French government, when it came up with cost estimates, kept them secret.

But now the report was leaked to the French magazine, Le Journal de Dimanche. Turns out, the upper end of the cost spectrum of an accident at a single reactor at the plant chosen for the study, the plant at Dampierre in the Department of Loiret in north-central France, would amount to over three times the country’s GDP. Financially, France would cease to exist as we know it.

State owned Vattenfall, one of Europe’s largest power producing companies, has found itself in the middle of a political storm since it became known they had plans to sell their part of the Swedish power grid. Accusations that CEO Lars G. Josefsson has ‘pledged’ the entire corporate group, in an agreement with German authorities, has made the Minister for Enterprise, Maud Olofsson, to put forward strong criticism.

LONDON, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Britain has set up a watchdog to ensure that decommissioning the nuclear power plants that the government wants to be built, and disposing of the waste, does not cost the taxpayer anything.

The Nuclear Liabilities Financing Assurance Board (NLFAB) will scrutinise how the companies planning to build the new power plants will pay to shut them at the end of their useful lives and clean up the radioactive waste they produce.

Taxpayers are being forced to indemnify the winner of the £7.5bn contract to decommission the highly toxic Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria against an accident because the bidders are based overseas. The preferred consortium will be announced on Friday.

Four consortia are vying for the contract, which could be worth £20bn over its lifetime, including US engineering giants Fluor, Bechtel, Washington Group and CH2M Hill, as well as French nuclear power group Areva and the Japanese firm Toshiba. UK companies Serco and Amec are also members of overseas-led consortia.

Silvia Pavoni reports on the potential and pitfalls of private finance for the UK´s new nuclear power station building programme.

Politicians are famous for announcing grand policy initiatives that have not been properly thought through and that then prove unworkable in practice. The UK government´s new nuclear power programme might be seen as one such ill thought out venture. It wants to build 10 new nuclear plants, replacing existing ones that are due to close, and proposes that the financing should be fulfilled entirely by the private sector. The first plant is planned to become operational by 2017 and the government hopes that the scheme will increase nuclear energy supply from the current 19% of national consumption.

Nuclear power plant operators in the Czech Republic are facing a huge and unexpected increase in insurance costs, following a government decision to raise the amount of liability for damage compensation from 6 billion Kč ($384.9 million) to 8 billion Kč.

In March, the government issued a statement instructing the Industry and Trade Ministry to work with the Environment Ministry to implement the increase by preparing a ratification of the protocol to the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage.